USC’s new ORAI PhD program will explore the interdisciplinary field of AI and operations research.
USC Viterbi School of Engineering is building research and teaching capacity at the synergistic intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and operations research (OR) thanks to a new $2.9 million National Science Foundation grant to create the world’s first specialized graduate certificate program in the emerging interdisciplinary field.
Phebe Vayanos, Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair in Engineering, and Bistra Dilkina, Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Early Career Chair in Computer Science, will co-direct the new ORAI program that will train the future leaders, researchers, and educators working at the interface of AI and OR.
AI and OR both harness technology to improve human decision-making, ensuring our decisions are more effective and informed by data. However, integrating technologies from the two disciplines has, until now, proven to be challenging due to different terminology, approaches, cultures and focus applications.
“AI and OR have complementary strengths,” said Vayanos. “AI flourishes in data-rich, unstructured, multi-modal environments; while OR, which excels at building models and at solving optimization problems, thrives in settings involving hard constraints to offer guaranteed performance even in the presence of uncertainty or ambiguity.”
Vayanos said that synergizing the strengths of the two fields can create solutions to challenging problems that cannot be addressed by any one discipline in isolation.
“For example, we can leverage optimization to design responsible (private, fair, interpretable, and robust) AI tools; we can integrate machine learning and OR to solve decision-making problems informed by data, including data that may be scarce, biased, noisy, or subject to distribution shifts; and we can use AI to speed up the solution of extremely hard, constrained, combinatorial decision-making problems.”
The new program represents a synergistic collaboration between USC’s Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science. These departments have a long history of conducting leading interdisciplinary research spanning AI and OR. The program will leverage the expertise of faculty from both departments, led by core ORAI faculty members, including Yolanda Gil, principal scientist at USC Information Sciences Institute; Andrés Gómez, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering; Vishal Gupta, associate professor of data sciences and operations and industrial and systems engineering; Evi Micha, WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science; Meisam Razaviyayn, Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair; and Vatsal Sharan, assistant professor of computer science. Gigi Ragusa, professor of engineering education practice, will also be an evaluator on the program.
Program co-directors (L) Bistra Dilkina, Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Early Career Chair in Computer Science and (R) Phebe Vayanos, Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair in Engineering .
“The new PhD certificate leverages the breadth of research and educational excellence at USC to create a program that we believe will be a model for other universities to follow. Our mission is to prepare and inspire a cohort of outstanding researchers who will push the frontiers of AI for decision-making through synergistic knowledge and a mindful approach to ethics and social impact,” said Dilkina.
In its first five years, the program will offer training to a diverse cohort of at least 38 PhD students from computer science and industrial and systems engineering, including 19 trainees supported on prestigious ORAI program fellowships. Another 10 PhD students and 15 master’s students are expected to enroll in the ORAI program courses each year. At the end of the grant, the certificate program will become self-sustained, and the co-directors will aim to grow it to a full interdisciplinary PhD degree in ORAI.
ORAI will engage and train students in research, possible deployment, and commercialization of technologies that integrate OR and AI. Students that are part of the program will perform research spanning AI and OR while taking four newly developed cutting-edge graduate courses that teach a blend of technologies across the two disciplines. Courses will be co-developed and co-taught by faculty in ISE and CS and will integrate ethics material to ensure that the decision-support systems created by graduates of the program can be responsibly deployed.
The program will also build on cases provided by leading USC research centers, including the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS), the METRANS Transportation Consortium, the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Threats and Emergencies (CREATE) and the USC site for the NSF AI Institute for Advances in Optimization.
Key features of the program will be a series of workshops promoting vital non-technical skills such as communication, teamwork, equity and inclusion, as well as a research seminar series featuring students and invited speakers. The program will culminate in an annual research symposium.
Vayanos said an important aim of the program was to build course materials that could be made broadly available as a stepping-stone toward introducing joint AI/OR PhD degrees at USC and other universities.
“I am really excited that we have the opportunity to put USC at the forefront of cutting-edge training and research in AI/OR and to graduate the future generations of researchers and educators equipped to address some of the most challenging decision-making problems of our time through interdisciplinary advances,” Vayanos said.
The ORAI program is now accepting applications: see here for instructions on how to apply.
Published on December 4th, 2024
Last updated on December 4th, 2024
